Definition of "pablum"

“If you want to be filled with pablum and tranquilizers,” Kennedy told crowds, “then don’t vote for me. I’m not going to give you any tired answers. […] ”

1971, Jules Archer, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, 1968: Year of Crisis, J. Messner, page 94

The Republican argument today is pablum, mush and saccharine. (Which exhausts my edible metaphors.)

1992 October 23, Ben Wattenberg, “Writer Likes Clinton”, in Daily Sentinel, page 2

Maybe we just don’t buy the pap, pablum and Pollyanification of the Futurama world view any longer because we are simply more sophisticated than the 1939ers.

1996, David H. Gelernter, 1939, the Lost World of the Fair, New York: Avon Books, page 29

To me, these points seem bland, boring, obvious—verging on tautology or pablum. To many believers in the worldview I have described, they are either straightforward heresy or a smokescreen for some real, underlying agenda—which is identified as communism, anarchism, or, somewhat confusingly, both.

2008, James Boyle, The Public Domain‎

And [the Supreme Court] will have to elaborate on Justice Kennedy's nausea-inducing pablum about liberty and jurisprudences of doubt.

2021 August 23, Josh Blackman, “Noah Feldman Indulges in Brett Kavanaugh Fan Fiction on Dobbs”, in Reason‎

A few scientists greeted the hypothesis as a thoughtful way to explain how living systems influenced the planet. Many others, however, called it New Age pablum.

2022 July 27, Keith Schneider, “James Lovelock, Whose Gaia Theory Saw the Earth as Alive, Dies at 103”, in The New York Times‎

The juice from its hydro-power dam was needed to supply meager light to a million homes and to cook the pablum for two million brand-new babies.

1957, C. M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, Wolfbane‎